Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, and with particular regard to very large production databases that are heavily used, there is a need for efficient backups that minimize resource usage, e.g., CPU, disk, network resources.